Of all the rhyming historians Robert of Gloucester in the reign of Edward I is the most considerable by reason of his style. Robert Manning of Brunne was more of a literary critic; the passage in which he deals severely with the contemporary rhyming dunces is singularly interesting in a time when literary criticism is rare. But Robert of Brunne is not so successful as Robert of Gloucester, who says less about the principles of rhyme, but discovers and uses the right kind. This was not the short couplet. The short couplet, the French measure, was indeed capable of almost anything in English, and it was brilliantly used for history by Barbour, and not meanly in the following century by Andrew Wyntoun. But it was in danger of monotony and flatness; for a popular audience a longer verse was better, with more swing in it. Robert of Gloucester took the ‘common measure’, with the ordinary accepted licences, as it is used by the ballad poets, and by some of the romances—for example, in the most admirable _Tale of Gamelyn_. He turns the history of Britain to the tune of popular minstrelsy, and if it is not very high poetry, at any rate it moves.
The same kind of thing was done about the same time with the _Lives of the Saints_—possibly some of them by Robert of Gloucester himself. These are found in many manuscripts, with many variations; but they are one book, the Legend, keeping the order of Saints’ Days in the Christian Year. This has been edited, under the title of the _South English Legendary_, and there are few books in which it is easier to make acquaintance with the heart and mind of the people; it contains all sorts of matter: church history as in the lives of St. Dunstan, St. Thomas of Canterbury and St. Francis ‘the Friar Minor’; and legend, in the common sense of the word, as in the life of St. Eustace, or of St. Julian ‘the good harbinger’. There is the adventure of Owen the knight in St. Patrick’s Purgatory; there is also the voyage of St. Brandan. In one place there is a short rhyming treatise on natural science, thoroughly good and sound, and in some ways very modern. The right tone of the popular science lecture has been discovered; and the most effective illustrations. The earth is a globe; night is the shadow of the earth; let us take an apple and a candle, and everything is plain. Astronomical distances are given in the usual good-natured manner of the lecturer who wishes to stir but not to shock the recipient minds. The cosmography, of course, is roughly that of Dante and Chaucer; seven spheres beneath the eighth, which is the sphere of the fixed stars and the highest visible heaven. The distance to that sphere from the earth is so great that a man walking forty miles a day could not reach it in eight thousand years. If Adam had started at once at that rate, and kept it up, he would not be there yet—